Are Trolls Valuable?

Do trolls improve your forum experience?

  • Yes, always.

    Votes: 1 3.8%
  • Often.

    Votes: 4 15.4%
  • Sometimes.

    Votes: 11 42.3%
  • Rarely.

    Votes: 5 19.2%
  • Never.

    Votes: 5 19.2%

  • Total voters
    26

HappyMan

Well-Known Member
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Jul 17, 2016
Messages
913
Do the entertainment value and general mental stimulation they provide make trolls more of an asset than a liability?
 
Speaking for myself, yes. They do add to my amusement. They also tend to drive some traffic and coax out some of the more shy members to post once in a while.

I do prefer if they can keep it just at the level where we don't have to outright ban them immediately, because then the fun ends...
 
I have said it before but I LOVE most trolls.
Some of them have made my day more than once and those who have followed us for the past 13 years probably know many of the one I am thinking of.
As hinted by D. the better breed are the one who manage to write a fair bunch of posts without giving us the urge to ban them on the spot.
It's always a mix feeling for me to have to come to the conclusion that we need to ban someone in his first ten posts because he isn;t a skilled troll. Such a waste of ressource of fun for the community.

To really enjoy a troll you need to quickly realize that s/he is just that and therefore you shouldn't get dragged into emotional responses.

Without trolls I would never have moderated forums for 13 Vears.. I would have get bored after just 6 months. I have been blessed to have to moderate quite a few interesting specimen, especially in the periode 2008-2011. After that periode we have seen the emergence of a bunch of facebook groups which have taken a large market share of the troll industry. Hard to compete and remain appealing for trolls, believe me.
 
FB used to be about connecting with people you know online, so in the past I was only exposed to actual friends and relatives. The company figured out that expanding the scope is good for business. Since FB heavily promotes local news stations, I relented and follow them. This is where I get exposed to the local idiots in the comment section of every news article.

The only reason I haven’t cut it out altogether is my desire to not live in a bubble. I need the constant uncomfortable reminder of the deplorables roaming out there.

The occasional trolls on this forum are tame in comparison. If I’m utterly bored and bereft of morals, I’d probably make an excellent troll.
 
Utterly boring (excuse me, I meant to say bored) and bereft of morals are high standards but I am convinced that with a bit more effort you could make the grade. Perhaps the Forum, along with Moderators, should consider establishing a Resident Troll position or two.
 
I enjoy trolls as they can bring some comedy to the table. I have seen some pure comical ones(funny and stupid) and then you have the ones that make reading the Jakarta Post fun.

Without trolls, I would never have learned it was the Jews who created Pokemon. Yes I was told this once in a post a few years back in the comment section of the Jakarta Post.
 
I think it was. Imagine a bored expat's wife with not much to do apart from lunches and wild parties... Trolls or trolling would be such amusement... :p ... But hey.. time is different now.. I don't think life would be back to normal.. and the tense of political and human rights issues.. I think Trolls would add more heat to the already-hot world.
 
In this forum (actually the only one for me), trolls include posters who are pro-Russia or pro-China in their opinion. Moderators seems to tolerate anti-Russian and anti-Chinese comments, even borderline racist ones. Providing alternative news sources is also frowned upon here even though it's not necessarily hoax or fake news. I don't know what it's like in other forums (as I don't have the time), so I can't compare. But I like the experience here so far, and believe it can be better if opposing opinions are encouraged instead of being harassed.
 
I think it was. Imagine a bored expat's wife with not much to do apart from lunches and wild parties... Trolls or trolling would be such amusement... :p ... But hey.. time is different now.. I don't think life would be back to normal.. and the tense of political and human rights issues.. I think Trolls would add more heat to the already-hot world.
Or a bored expat's husband........:)
 
Like my fellow mods, I love trolls - at least, some of them. Obviously, there are limits. Hate speech, spreading dangerous misinformation, porn and the like go beyond what's tolerable at any time. But a troll who just wants to stir the pot a little is fantastic fun and great for getting readership and participation levels up.

I think my favorite troll ever was on the old board, the self-righteous misogynist who will live forever in my memory as "Toothbrush Guy." I don't know if he was literally trolling in the sense of posting insincerely just to get a rise out of people, or if he really believed what he wrote. Either way it made for good troll-type posting. He insisted his wife had to be a virgin because a woman is like a toothbrush - you wouldn't want to use a toothbrush that had been in someone else's mouth, so why would you want to have sex with a woman who had been penetrated by another man.

That thread went on and on with many spirited responses from forum members, and it was hilarious. I even went back to the old place to re-read it a few times, it was so funny. Sadly, apparently the last time Paman did a forum "upgrade" they lost a large chunk of their archives, including the wisdom, or at least strenuous argumentation, of Toothbrush Guy.

My only regret about my participation in that thread is that I don't believe I pointed out to him that toothbrushes need to be replaced at regular intervals. Ah well.
 
I don't remember Toothbrush Guy, but it seems I missed a good one. This was probably suggested way back when, but getting a new toothbrush would seem to be more of a feminist analogy for dumping partners who have ceased to pleasure.
 
I don’t remember the toothbrush guy, but I remember the piano guy. His shtick was to create clones or sockpuppets, and I had fun identifying them. He was clearly an intelligent guy, but he liked to play with people’s feelings like a dog with chew toys. It wasn’t about right or wrong with him, it was all about getting people upset. He was a troll in the literal sense. To him my gloves were off because his sheer arrogance rubbed me the wrong way. Not my proudest moments, but he probably deserved it.
 
Do you mean superpie (one of his names, there are others)? Maybe you were thinking of someone else, but superpie was fairly prolific for a while.
 
Do you mean superpie (one of his names, there are others)? Maybe you were thinking of someone else, but superpie was fairly prolific for a while.
It could be him. It was so long ago that my memory is a little hazy.
 
It could be him. It was so long ago that my memory is a little hazy.
It is him. No doubt, and it would probably comes back to your memory if I call him by his main moniker (or should I say his main character?)... Brigadier van der schnoof.
This was his last thread and appearance in our community.
 
I got along with superpie/Brigsie pretty well. We cyber-know each other on a different forum. He was unaware of the connection until I pointed it out, but he was quite cool about it.
 
I got along with superpie/Brigsie pretty well. We cyber-know each other on a different forum. He was unaware of the connection until I pointed it out, but he was quite cool about it.
Like you I wouldn't classify him as a troll.

To me a real troll is primarily posting to provoke, to trigger emotional responses and Brigadier wasn't. Also he always believed in what he was posting, while many trolls just don't.

I don't deny many of his posts were inflammatory but I disagree if we say that it was done in the sole purpose to create flame wars, that the only purpose for him to post was to upset posters of the board.

What ultimately got him his "troll certification" was the fact that he attempted to escape his ban which was decided after that he went too far one time too much.

I would say that Hombre was much closer to the definition of a troll than Brigadier was.

Far too many times Hombre was needling posters, notably the then resident village idiot of the forum, when there was no need for, when it was totally uncalled for, in threads which had nothing to do with the topic he was needling posters with and he was doing precisely because he knew it would hurt and trigger a response. That is what nasty trolling is about.
 

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